Also under methodologies was: do you put together requirements that are cast in stone or do you make incremental (iterative) releases as feature sets are completed.
One of the big factors here is how well you understand the environment of your customers. Rigid requirements will get the project done faster, but there is more risk since the requirements may be wrong. Incremental releases gives you flexibility to change your product to be what the customer really wants, but it takes longer to develop.
As an aside; I personally prefer the incremental approach. I think the process of recertifying existing features with each release improves overall testing. It also improves communication between the developers and the customers.
I've just seen projects where people have gone to lengths to design functionality that (from my perspective) seems uncalled for and unsuited to the project.
"We need that feature because the old system had it."
The difficulty here is making absolutely sure the client and the mangement know the difference between a working prototype with canned data and a fully functional application capable of handling real world situations.
If you're working with internal customers, I would recommend using live data. Build your project incrementally, giving the users a chance to get involved throughout the process. This helps because developers rarely know all the details of what the users need to perform their jobs. It's better to have a user say "function x doesn't work that way" two weeks after the start of the project rather than two weeks before the end. Why live data? Because users have their jobs to do. If they are just 'testing', they will tend to put it off and it never gets done. Of course, this means a little extra work putting in safeguards so they can't inadvertantly corrupt data.
I say this as someone who has worked on several projects where the requirements were either minimal, incomplete, or plain wrong. The requirements were written by experienced developers who thought they knew what needed to be built. Unfortunately, developers tend to think that since they understand the database and business rules, they know how users do their job.
Why can't the carrier just drop all the union employees...and hire a new crowd.
Imagine the company you work for firing EVERY employee that is not a member of management at the same time. You can't interview/hire/train replacements ahead of time because the unions would walk out if they heard about it. And, assuming you managed to pull this off without killing your company, you'd spend the next 5 years in court fighting the lawsuits. You couldn't, for instance, lockout the pilots union and replace them because the baggage handlers and mechanics unions would walk out in sympathy (self preservation). It's an all or nothing plan, and extremely risky.
BTW, the original purpose of unions still exist, but not to the degree that it once did. Know anyone working in IT required to work 50hrs a week as a salary requirement as well as any other OT required to meet a deadline, on call 24x7 and required to carry a cell and/or pager? Ask the developers at Electronic Arts if a union wouldn't have it's uses.
If you're going to build a completely arbitrary limitation into the software you need to have the software hit that limitation gracefully, rather than cough up blood.
That's not an arbitrary limitation. It's a design decision. Arbitrary would have been something like 25,000, because it's not based on anything other than pulling a number out of your ass. It might have been an uninformed or arbitrary design decision to use a signed vs unsigned variable though.
Granted, I agree there should have been a check in the software to make sure it wasn't approaching a limit without notifying someone. And there should have been a documented process to fix the problem short of shutting down an airline.
After following those simple rules, you will be dead and no longer a problem on the highways.
When people are driving like idiots around you, and following too close, remove your foot from the gas pedal, and let your car slow to a crawl.
This encourages them to follow even closer. I have seen people driving the speed limit (70mph) on I-29 get tailgated by someone wanting to drive 80+. When the tailgator gets irritated, they move in, sometimes as close as 6 inches. Short of a dead stop, there is no way to make that a safe following distance.
When someone cuts you off, or is otherwise driving like an idiot, trying to get in-front of you, simply turn on your bright lights, and place your hand on the horn.
This will encourage road rage. Most likely followed by them slamming on their brakes. Thus silencing the horn and extinguishing those bright lights. And possibly you too.
And there won't be any tickets until after the accident, the reason they do these things is because there are no cops around.
We think 110 is a nice cruising speed for the freeway.
The number only sounds big. It's 68mph. We have 65 and 70 mph highways in my part of the country. And some western states have 75mph limits. That would be nearly 121 for you. Texas could probably justify 75mph for their new corporate welfare program.
Although before you generalize too badly, there are places in the country where people do seem to realize that you drive as far to the right as you can stay while maintaining your speed, and then pass on the left. They just tend to be in my experience, more rural states.
We can blame the highway engineers for their behavior in many urban areas. They can't decide whether the exits are going to be on the right or the left. Kansas City is a perfect example. They are completely redoing a congested area called the Grandview Triangle. It's where I-435, I-470, and US71 come together. It's too inconvenient to make all the exits on the right, so they have a little of both. That makes less confident drivers choose to drive in the left lane because they have a left exit 5 miles down the road. The exit from I-435 N to I-70 W is another prime example.
I'm not sure what gas station size has to do with how well built the Florida Turnpike is. But seriously, driving a 26 ft box truck is tough? I've got a 23 ft class C motorhome, and the only place I've had a problem is fast food places. (won't fit through the drive through, parking spaces are too small)
But then again I used to drive a C70 and pulled a 20+ ft box trailer in congested rush hour construction traffic. Just gotta learn to enjoy the view. (some people don't realize the inside of their car is viewable from higher elevations)
BTW, UHaul horror story. When my dad moved about 15 years ago we rented a 26 ft truck. After we got it out on the road we found that the power steering faded in tight spaces, it had a knot on one of the inside duals the size of your fist, and the air brakes would 'air up' on you. Nothing like throwing all your possesions in one of those and taking off across the state. But his wife was a school bus driver in a small town, so she was used to driving things like that.
If they are serious about going the Citrix/Terminal Services route, you might consider moving all of their applications to the server and migrating them to cheap thin clients on their desktop. From an administration perspective, managing the machines becomes a lot easier. They can't install anything on their local machines. Most don't need to have access to install anything to the server. No virus software needed for the clients. Actually, no client management at all. If one breaks, you just replace it because their customizations are all on the server. And while you might stretch a PC to 5 years, the only limitation on a thin client will be the display resolution.
The only drawback is political. You have to manage user egos when they find they can't do whatever they want with 'their' PC anymore.
Windows is like a high maintenance wife. Everything is nice to look at, but it cleans out your wallet and there is a lot of down time.
There's nothing new here. There have been portable TVs and boomboxes for decades. And I'm sure all the national parks have pretty good cell phone coverage.
There is no law that requires people to be courteous, and these days it's not part of our culture. Fortunately, the people who are going to be annoying are also too lazy to walk anywhere, so any trail more than a mile long is going to be fairly gadget free.
I agree that $15 a day seems high. $10 a day would be my maximum, while $5 a day on a managed WLAN would be ideal. On the other hand, $10 is around 5 gallons of fuel, or around 40 miles. High WiFi charges are far from the biggest obstacle for RVers these days.
I'd be willing to bet that private campgrounds will quickly go to free WiFi. It's a cheap feature to offer, and as more RVers re-evaluate their operation costs a lot will be parking/selling their rigs. $60k for a new class C and 10-12 mpg. Gas prices aren't going to go back down either. The RV campground business could get very competitive. Consider this: when I travel by car I drive for 10-12 hours a day, so conservatively, let's say 600 miles. My RV gets 7 mpg (Ford 460, might get it to 9 mpg when I put in the $800 fuel injection). 86 gallons a day, $137 a day @ $1.60 a gallon. So unless I stay in one spot for several days, it's cheaper to drive a car and rent a motel room. RVers aren't into 'roughing it', after all. And motels already offer free broadband.
I do a great deal of shopping at Amazon, but I would never rely on them for a christmas present after Dec 1. Their system has been known to have problems and ship dates change.
Just last month I ordered a carpet cleaner that was slated to ship in 1-2 weeks. Three weeks later it was showing a deliver date of Dec 2, on Dec 9. I sent them e-mail and got a form response with a $10 coupon. No new ship date, no tracking number, it showed up 2 days later. If it had been a present, I would have been concerned that the order was screwed up.
Two years ago I ordered some Italian language software for my niece, it was supposed to ship in 24 hours. Then it went to out of stock and the ship date kept sliding. A week before Christmas it was no longer possible for it to make it on time, so I had to fight the crowds of last minute shoppers to get a replacement locally.
While technically correct, to the user it really doesn't matter. I have had World of Warcraft bluescreen my XP laptop after installing a client patch. Granted, I'm sure it's related to a bug in the video driver, but up to that point, WoW is the only app that has ever done it. OTOH, why did the problem go away when I defragged the drive?
BTW, I also had the defrag bluescreen too, which in itself is a scarey experience. But now that the drive has successfully defragged, the system is fine. (and no, the HD is not failing)
In regards to your web site, why don't you just put it in a CVS? Messages might be lost (in my experience, with most phpBBs that's not a big loss), but to restore the board you'd just fetch the latest good version. Having multiple versions would help with viruses that wait to destroy. This particular attack would take a couple minutes to repair, and a few more to patch.
Of course you still need to do your backup of the CVS.
If that bothers you, you are entirely too sensitive about someone not agreeing with your opinion.
I don't believe I have taken your statements out of context. You're basically saying; figure out what you want, give it to an inexperienced CS student to complete unsupervised, and be prepared to pay well.
And then in your reply, it appears to be a thinly veiled personal attack, making the assumption that I know nothing about software development. BTW, look up engineer. I've never met a true software 'engineer'. They have simply co-opted the term. Just like architect. It sounds cooler to say 're-architected' instead of 'redesigned'.
But I think I'll skip the software 'engineering' course, entry level or not. Simply because I would find it incredibly dull (and basic). 20+ years of programming experience kind of does that. And I believe if I look at my business card, yep, sure enough, it says Programmer/Analyst, Warehouse Automation. And I believe I can make out the name of the multi-national corporation at the top too.
If you don't like the responses you get here, maybe you should accept that people don't share your opinion, and you shouldn't respond with guns blazing.
Oh, and since I currently happen to be going back for another degree, I deal with the CS students that you're so fond of on a weekly basis. Some are talented, some are not. Few of the undergrads (or recent grads), have to ability to design what he is asking for. And if he took your advice he would be rolling the dice, and most likely throwing away his money.
Give him clear requirements and let him do his thing.
Realize that CS students most likely know absolutely nothing about your business (and in many cases, any business). They may know the latest and greatest language to hit the Internet, they may only know the languages they are being taught in school. Be very clear about what the software needs to do, how it is accomplished, and what goals need to be met. If you are going to pay someone to build this for you, get a book on system analysis and design and document everything. Be prepared to have to explain to them how to explode a bill of materials, or why you need journals for every financial transaction.
You shouldn't care about what goes on under the hood as long as the solution the cs student comes up with works and is what you want.
Absolutely not. The last thing you need is for some student to write your system in Haskell, "because that is what they are using at school." That student is going to move on when they graduate. You need them to use common tools so if you need to have modifications at a later date, you can find someone to do them.
You don't need to look over their shoulder as they code, but you should look at the code. You don't have to understand it, but every function should minimally have a comment on what it does. IE:
bool Function ExplodeBOM(string sPart) // this function recursively explodes the bill of materials for the given part...... // if it fails, it will return false and the error will be stored in xxxxx.
Set up a project schedule with regular gates. March 1, GNUCash installed, configured, accounts set up. April 1, POS frontend integrated into GNUCash.
Students have other priorities; midterms, finals, spring break.
A company is working on a Firebird modification called Fyracle that will allow it to integrate with Compiere.
I have to wonder if you aren't looking for the wrong solution though. Enterprise Resource Planning, for a business your size, is kind of like fishing with grenades. Sure, it will get the job done.....
Wouldn't something like GNUCash with a POS add-on and a inventory database pretty much cover everything?
Oddly enough, when I was in college I noticed that I purchased the same things every week. So when I went to the store once, I wrote down the aisle numbers and put everything in a spreadsheet. Sort, print, compare it to what I had in the cupboard (not much, poor college student), and I had a quick, optimized shopping list.
If I could keep the batteries charged in my PDA, I'd be tempted to inventory things that I don't buy very often, like spices. Nobody needs 5 cans of chili spice because they couldn't remember if they had any, and bought more just to be sure.
and render everything on the server, then send the image to the client
That takes things to the extreme. The server needs to validate communications between it and the clients. It should run a sanity check to see if the commands from the client are reasonable. But having the server render the image would be a huge waste of resources. Instead, it should have a language that it can use to tell the client to render objects based on server commands. Similar to the way Citrix, RDP, and X do.
this is what causes "rubber bounding" in laggy times
That's rubber banding. IE. you see your character move, the server is lagged and doesn't, the server corrects your location and you 'rubber band' back to a previous position. I haven't see this happen on WoW, but I have experienced 'lag turn'. This is where you turn your character, you see no effect, so you try again. Then when the server catches up and you start to move, you head off in the wrong direction.
Call me bitter, but I got into this job because I love it.
You should just give up and burn out like the rest of us. You'll be much happier and it's easier to deal with those programmers that aren't qualified to write a 'Hello World' program.
If you were to buy a bunch of this IDEs to support multiple programmers who want to use their religious language...
A non issue, unless you are a moron as a manager. Everybody writes in the same language. You can't have App A written in C++, App B written in Java, and App C written in Delphi. Because then when you have to add/replace programmers, you need someone fluent in all three. So you pick a language, and anyone who won't use it can go find another job.
The only practical exceptions are platform issues. Mainframe, PC, embedded.
This seems to be normal for Borland presentations. They take them very seriously.
Several years ago a local VB users' group put together a VB/Delphi presentation. Borland sent David I, Microsoft sent a local C++ coder with a powerpoint presentation. I remember the first time I saw a database app put together with a dbGrid, a datasource, a TTable, and 30 seconds.
As impressive as those presentations are, you can go to BorCon and melt your brain with "I didn't know it could do that" kinds of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Also under methodologies was: do you put together requirements that are cast in stone or do you make incremental (iterative) releases as feature sets are completed.
One of the big factors here is how well you understand the environment of your customers. Rigid requirements will get the project done faster, but there is more risk since the requirements may be wrong. Incremental releases gives you flexibility to change your product to be what the customer really wants, but it takes longer to develop.
As an aside; I personally prefer the incremental approach. I think the process of recertifying existing features with each release improves overall testing. It also improves communication between the developers and the customers.
You've just described trickle down economics.
I've just seen projects where people have gone to lengths to design functionality that (from my perspective) seems uncalled for and unsuited to the project.
"We need that feature because the old system had it."
Do you use that feature?
"No."
Then why spend the time to implement it?
"Because the old system had it."
The difficulty here is making absolutely sure the client and the mangement know the difference between a working prototype with canned data and a fully functional application capable of handling real world situations.
If you're working with internal customers, I would recommend using live data. Build your project incrementally, giving the users a chance to get involved throughout the process. This helps because developers rarely know all the details of what the users need to perform their jobs. It's better to have a user say "function x doesn't work that way" two weeks after the start of the project rather than two weeks before the end. Why live data? Because users have their jobs to do. If they are just 'testing', they will tend to put it off and it never gets done. Of course, this means a little extra work putting in safeguards so they can't inadvertantly corrupt data.
I say this as someone who has worked on several projects where the requirements were either minimal, incomplete, or plain wrong. The requirements were written by experienced developers who thought they knew what needed to be built. Unfortunately, developers tend to think that since they understand the database and business rules, they know how users do their job.
Why can't the carrier just drop all the union employees...and hire a new crowd.
Imagine the company you work for firing EVERY employee that is not a member of management at the same time. You can't interview/hire/train replacements ahead of time because the unions would walk out if they heard about it. And, assuming you managed to pull this off without killing your company, you'd spend the next 5 years in court fighting the lawsuits. You couldn't, for instance, lockout the pilots union and replace them because the baggage handlers and mechanics unions would walk out in sympathy (self preservation). It's an all or nothing plan, and extremely risky.
BTW, the original purpose of unions still exist, but not to the degree that it once did. Know anyone working in IT required to work 50hrs a week as a salary requirement as well as any other OT required to meet a deadline, on call 24x7 and required to carry a cell and/or pager? Ask the developers at Electronic Arts if a union wouldn't have it's uses.
If you're going to build a completely arbitrary limitation into the software you need to have the software hit that limitation gracefully, rather than cough up blood.
That's not an arbitrary limitation. It's a design decision. Arbitrary would have been something like 25,000, because it's not based on anything other than pulling a number out of your ass. It might have been an uninformed or arbitrary design decision to use a signed vs unsigned variable though.
Granted, I agree there should have been a check in the software to make sure it wasn't approaching a limit without notifying someone. And there should have been a documented process to fix the problem short of shutting down an airline.
After following those simple rules, you will be dead and no longer a problem on the highways.
When people are driving like idiots around you, and following too close, remove your foot from the gas pedal, and let your car slow to a crawl.
This encourages them to follow even closer. I have seen people driving the speed limit (70mph) on I-29 get tailgated by someone wanting to drive 80+. When the tailgator gets irritated, they move in, sometimes as close as 6 inches. Short of a dead stop, there is no way to make that a safe following distance.
When someone cuts you off, or is otherwise driving like an idiot, trying to get in-front of you, simply turn on your bright lights, and place your hand on the horn.
This will encourage road rage. Most likely followed by them slamming on their brakes. Thus silencing the horn and extinguishing those bright lights. And possibly you too.
And there won't be any tickets until after the accident, the reason they do these things is because there are no cops around.
We think 110 is a nice cruising speed for the freeway.
The number only sounds big. It's 68mph. We have 65 and 70 mph highways in my part of the country. And some western states have 75mph limits. That would be nearly 121 for you. Texas could probably justify 75mph for their new corporate welfare program.
Although before you generalize too badly, there are places in the country where people do seem to realize that you drive as far to the right as you can stay while maintaining your speed, and then pass on the left. They just tend to be in my experience, more rural states.
We can blame the highway engineers for their behavior in many urban areas. They can't decide whether the exits are going to be on the right or the left. Kansas City is a perfect example. They are completely redoing a congested area called the Grandview Triangle. It's where I-435, I-470, and US71 come together. It's too inconvenient to make all the exits on the right, so they have a little of both. That makes less confident drivers choose to drive in the left lane because they have a left exit 5 miles down the road. The exit from I-435 N to I-70 W is another prime example.
I'm not sure what gas station size has to do with how well built the Florida Turnpike is. But seriously, driving a 26 ft box truck is tough? I've got a 23 ft class C motorhome, and the only place I've had a problem is fast food places. (won't fit through the drive through, parking spaces are too small)
But then again I used to drive a C70 and pulled a 20+ ft box trailer in congested rush hour construction traffic. Just gotta learn to enjoy the view. (some people don't realize the inside of their car is viewable from higher elevations)
BTW, UHaul horror story. When my dad moved about 15 years ago we rented a 26 ft truck. After we got it out on the road we found that the power steering faded in tight spaces, it had a knot on one of the inside duals the size of your fist, and the air brakes would 'air up' on you. Nothing like throwing all your possesions in one of those and taking off across the state. But his wife was a school bus driver in a small town, so she was used to driving things like that.
If they are serious about going the Citrix/Terminal Services route, you might consider moving all of their applications to the server and migrating them to cheap thin clients on their desktop. From an administration perspective, managing the machines becomes a lot easier. They can't install anything on their local machines. Most don't need to have access to install anything to the server. No virus software needed for the clients. Actually, no client management at all. If one breaks, you just replace it because their customizations are all on the server. And while you might stretch a PC to 5 years, the only limitation on a thin client will be the display resolution.
The only drawback is political. You have to manage user egos when they find they can't do whatever they want with 'their' PC anymore.
Windows is like a high maintenance wife. Everything is nice to look at, but it cleans out your wallet and there is a lot of down time.
There's nothing new here. There have been portable TVs and boomboxes for decades. And I'm sure all the national parks have pretty good cell phone coverage.
There is no law that requires people to be courteous, and these days it's not part of our culture. Fortunately, the people who are going to be annoying are also too lazy to walk anywhere, so any trail more than a mile long is going to be fairly gadget free.
I agree that $15 a day seems high. $10 a day would be my maximum, while $5 a day on a managed WLAN would be ideal. On the other hand, $10 is around 5 gallons of fuel, or around 40 miles. High WiFi charges are far from the biggest obstacle for RVers these days.
I'd be willing to bet that private campgrounds will quickly go to free WiFi. It's a cheap feature to offer, and as more RVers re-evaluate their operation costs a lot will be parking/selling their rigs. $60k for a new class C and 10-12 mpg. Gas prices aren't going to go back down either. The RV campground business could get very competitive. Consider this: when I travel by car I drive for 10-12 hours a day, so conservatively, let's say 600 miles. My RV gets 7 mpg (Ford 460, might get it to 9 mpg when I put in the $800 fuel injection). 86 gallons a day, $137 a day @ $1.60 a gallon. So unless I stay in one spot for several days, it's cheaper to drive a car and rent a motel room. RVers aren't into 'roughing it', after all. And motels already offer free broadband.
I do a great deal of shopping at Amazon, but I would never rely on them for a christmas present after Dec 1. Their system has been known to have problems and ship dates change.
Just last month I ordered a carpet cleaner that was slated to ship in 1-2 weeks. Three weeks later it was showing a deliver date of Dec 2, on Dec 9. I sent them e-mail and got a form response with a $10 coupon. No new ship date, no tracking number, it showed up 2 days later. If it had been a present, I would have been concerned that the order was screwed up.
Two years ago I ordered some Italian language software for my niece, it was supposed to ship in 24 hours. Then it went to out of stock and the ship date kept sliding. A week before Christmas it was no longer possible for it to make it on time, so I had to fight the crowds of last minute shoppers to get a replacement locally.
While technically correct, to the user it really doesn't matter. I have had World of Warcraft bluescreen my XP laptop after installing a client patch. Granted, I'm sure it's related to a bug in the video driver, but up to that point, WoW is the only app that has ever done it. OTOH, why did the problem go away when I defragged the drive?
BTW, I also had the defrag bluescreen too, which in itself is a scarey experience. But now that the drive has successfully defragged, the system is fine. (and no, the HD is not failing)
In regards to your web site, why don't you just put it in a CVS? Messages might be lost (in my experience, with most phpBBs that's not a big loss), but to restore the board you'd just fetch the latest good version. Having multiple versions would help with viruses that wait to destroy. This particular attack would take a couple minutes to repair, and a few more to patch.
Of course you still need to do your backup of the CVS.
If that bothers you, you are entirely too sensitive about someone not agreeing with your opinion.
I don't believe I have taken your statements out of context. You're basically saying; figure out what you want, give it to an inexperienced CS student to complete unsupervised, and be prepared to pay well.
And then in your reply, it appears to be a thinly veiled personal attack, making the assumption that I know nothing about software development. BTW, look up engineer. I've never met a true software 'engineer'. They have simply co-opted the term. Just like architect. It sounds cooler to say 're-architected' instead of 'redesigned'.
But I think I'll skip the software 'engineering' course, entry level or not. Simply because I would find it incredibly dull (and basic). 20+ years of programming experience kind of does that. And I believe if I look at my business card, yep, sure enough, it says Programmer/Analyst, Warehouse Automation. And I believe I can make out the name of the multi-national corporation at the top too.
If you don't like the responses you get here, maybe you should accept that people don't share your opinion, and you shouldn't respond with guns blazing.
Oh, and since I currently happen to be going back for another degree, I deal with the CS students that you're so fond of on a weekly basis. Some are talented, some are not. Few of the undergrads (or recent grads), have to ability to design what he is asking for. And if he took your advice he would be rolling the dice, and most likely throwing away his money.
But you be sure and have a nice day...
Give him clear requirements and let him do his thing.
// this function recursively explodes the bill of materials for the given part......
// if it fails, it will return false and the error will be stored in xxxxx.
Realize that CS students most likely know absolutely nothing about your business (and in many cases, any business). They may know the latest and greatest language to hit the Internet, they may only know the languages they are being taught in school. Be very clear about what the software needs to do, how it is accomplished, and what goals need to be met. If you are going to pay someone to build this for you, get a book on system analysis and design and document everything. Be prepared to have to explain to them how to explode a bill of materials, or why you need journals for every financial transaction.
You shouldn't care about what goes on under the hood as long as the solution the cs student comes up with works and is what you want.
Absolutely not. The last thing you need is for some student to write your system in Haskell, "because that is what they are using at school." That student is going to move on when they graduate. You need them to use common tools so if you need to have modifications at a later date, you can find someone to do them.
You don't need to look over their shoulder as they code, but you should look at the code. You don't have to understand it, but every function should minimally have a comment on what it does. IE:
bool Function ExplodeBOM(string sPart)
Set up a project schedule with regular gates.
March 1, GNUCash installed, configured, accounts set up.
April 1, POS frontend integrated into GNUCash.
Students have other priorities; midterms, finals, spring break.
A company is working on a Firebird modification called Fyracle that will allow it to integrate with Compiere.
I have to wonder if you aren't looking for the wrong solution though. Enterprise Resource Planning, for a business your size, is kind of like fishing with grenades. Sure, it will get the job done.....
Wouldn't something like GNUCash with a POS add-on and a inventory database pretty much cover everything?
Oddly enough, when I was in college I noticed that I purchased the same things every week. So when I went to the store once, I wrote down the aisle numbers and put everything in a spreadsheet. Sort, print, compare it to what I had in the cupboard (not much, poor college student), and I had a quick, optimized shopping list.
If I could keep the batteries charged in my PDA, I'd be tempted to inventory things that I don't buy very often, like spices. Nobody needs 5 cans of chili spice because they couldn't remember if they had any, and bought more just to be sure.
and render everything on the server, then send the image to the client
That takes things to the extreme. The server needs to validate communications between it and the clients. It should run a sanity check to see if the commands from the client are reasonable. But having the server render the image would be a huge waste of resources. Instead, it should have a language that it can use to tell the client to render objects based on server commands. Similar to the way Citrix, RDP, and X do.
this is what causes "rubber bounding" in laggy times
That's rubber banding. IE. you see your character move, the server is lagged and doesn't, the server corrects your location and you 'rubber band' back to a previous position. I haven't see this happen on WoW, but I have experienced 'lag turn'. This is where you turn your character, you see no effect, so you try again. Then when the server catches up and you start to move, you head off in the wrong direction.
Call me bitter, but I got into this job because I love it.
You should just give up and burn out like the rest of us. You'll be much happier and it's easier to deal with those programmers that aren't qualified to write a 'Hello World' program.
Sweet. A Lycos sponsered, remote controlled army of zombies.
Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
If you were to buy a bunch of this IDEs to support multiple programmers who want to use their religious language...
A non issue, unless you are a moron as a manager. Everybody writes in the same language. You can't have App A written in C++, App B written in Java, and App C written in Delphi. Because then when you have to add/replace programmers, you need someone fluent in all three. So you pick a language, and anyone who won't use it can go find another job.
The only practical exceptions are platform issues. Mainframe, PC, embedded.
This seems to be normal for Borland presentations. They take them very seriously.
Several years ago a local VB users' group put together a VB/Delphi presentation. Borland sent David I, Microsoft sent a local C++ coder with a powerpoint presentation. I remember the first time I saw a database app put together with a dbGrid, a datasource, a TTable, and 30 seconds.
As impressive as those presentations are, you can go to BorCon and melt your brain with "I didn't know it could do that" kinds of things.